In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (80 page)

No matter, Andrée, like Rosemonde and Gisèle, indeed more than they,
was, when all was said, a friend of Albertine, sharing her life,
imitating her conduct, so closely that, the first day, I had not at
once distinguished them one from another. Over these girls, flowering
sprays of roses whose principal charm was that they outlined
themselves against the sea, the same undivided partnership prevailed
as at the time when I did not know them, when the appearance of no
matter which of them had caused me such violent emotion by its
announcement that the little band was not far off. And even now the
sight of one of them filled me with a pleasure into which there
entered, to an extent which I should not have found it easy to define,
the thought of seeing the others follow her in due course, and even if
they did not come that day, speaking about them, and knowing that they
would be told that I had been on the beach.

It was no longer simply the attraction of those first days, it was a
regular love–longing which hesitated among them all, so far was each
the natural substitute for the others. My bitterest grief would not
have been to be thrown over by whichever of the girls I liked best,
but I should at once have liked best, because I should have fastened
on to her the whole of the melancholy dream which had been floating
vaguely among them all, her who had thrown me over. It would,
moreover, in that event, be the loss of all her friends, in whose eyes
I should speedily have forfeited whatever advantage I might possess,
that I should, in losing her, have unconsciously regretted, having
vowed to them that sort of collective love which the politician and
the actor feel for the public for whose desertion of them after they
have enjoyed all its favours they can never be consoled. Even those
favours which I had failed to win from Albertine I would hope suddenly
to receive from one or other who had parted from me in the evening
with a word or glance of ambiguous meaning, thanks to which it was to
her that, for the next day or so, my desire would turn. It strayed
among them all the more voluptuously in that upon those volatile faces
a comparative fixation of features had now begun, and had been carried
far enough for the eye to distinguish—even if it were to change yet
further—each malleable and floating effigy. To the differences that
existed among them there was doubtless very little that corresponded
in the no less marked differences in the length and breadth of those
features, any of which might, perhaps, dissimilar as the girls
appeared, almost have been lifted bodily from one face and imposed at
random upon any other. But our knowledge of faces is not
mathematical. In the first place, it does not begin with the
measurement of the parts, it takes as its starting point an
expression, a combination of the whole. In Andrée, for instance, the
fineness of her gentle eyes seemed to go with the thinness of her
nose, as slender as a mere curve which one could imagine as having
been traced in order to produce along a single line the idea of
delicacy divided higher up between the dual smile of her twin gaze. A
line equally fine was engraved in her hair, pliant and deep as the
line with which the wind furrows the sand. And in her it must have
been hereditary; for the snow–white hair of Andrée's mother was driven
in the same way, forming here a swelling, there a depression, like a
snowdrift that rises or sinks according to the irregularities of the
soil. Certainly, when compared with the fine delineation of Andrée's,
Rosemonde's nose seemed to present broad surfaces, like a high tower
raised upon massive foundations. Albeit expression suffices to make us
believe in enormous differences between things that are separated by
infinitely little—albeit that infinitely little may by itself create
an expression that is absolutely unique, an individuality—it was not
only the infinitely little of its lines and the originality of its
expression that made each of these faces appear irreducible to terms
of any other. Between my friends' faces their colouring established a
separation wider still, not so much by the varied beauty of the tones
with which it provided them, so contrasted that I felt when I looked
at Rosemonde—flooded with a sulphurous rose colour, with the further
contrast of the greenish light in her eyes—and then at Andrée—whose
white cheeks received such an austere distinction from her black
hair—the same kind of pleasure as if I had been looking alternately
at a geranium growing by a sunlit sea and a camellia in the night; but
principally because the infinitely little differences of their lines
were enlarged out of all proportion, the relations between one and
another surface entirely changed by this new element of colour which,
in addition to being a dispenser of tints, is great at restoring, or
rather at altering, dimensions. So that faces which were perhaps
constructed on not dissimilar lines, according as they were lighted by
the flaming torch of an auburn poll or high complexion, or by the
white glimmer of a dull pallor, grew sharper or broader, became
something else, like those properties used in the Russian ballet,
consisting sometimes, when they are seen in the light of day, of a
mere disc of paper, out of which the genius of a Bakst, according to
the blood–red or moonlit effect in which he plunges his stage, makes a
hard incrustation, like a turquoise on a palace well, or a swooning
softness, as of a Bengal rose in an eastern garden. And so when
acquiring a knowledge of faces we take careful measurements, but as
painters, not as surveyors.

So it was with Albertine as with her friends. On certain days, slim,
with grey cheeks, a sullen air, a violet transparency falling
obliquely from her such as we notice sometimes on the sea, she seemed
to be feeling the sorrows of exile. On other days her face, more
sleek, caught and glued my desires to its varnished surface and
prevented them from going any farther; unless I caught a sudden
glimpse of her from the side, for her dull cheeks, like white wax on
the surface, were visibly pink beneath, which made me anxious to kiss
them, to reach that different tint which thus avoided my touch. At
other times happiness bathed her cheeks with a clarity so mobile that
the skin, grown fluid and vague, gave passage to a sort of stealthy
and subcutaneous gaze, which made it appear to be of another colour
but not of another substance than her eyes; sometimes, instinctively,
when one looked at her face punctuated with tiny brown marks among
which floated what were simply two larger, bluer stains, it was like
looking at the egg of a goldfinch—or often like an opalescent agate
cut and polished in two places only, where, from the heart of the
brown stone, shone like the transparent wings of a sky–blue butterfly
her eyes, those features in which the flesh becomes a mirror and gives
us the illusion that it allows us, more than through the other parts
of the body, to approach the soul. But most often of all she shewed
more colour, and was then more animated; sometimes the only pink thing
in her white face was the tip of her nose, as finely pointed as that
of a mischievous kitten with which one would have liked to stop and
play; sometimes her cheeks were so glossy that one's glance slipped,
as over the surface of a miniature, over their pink enamel, which was
made to appear still more delicate, more private, by the enclosing
though half–opened case of her black hair; or it might happen that the
tint of her cheeks had deepened to the violet shade of the red
cyclamen, and, at times, even, when she was flushed or feverish, with
a suggestion of unhealthiness which lowered my desire to something
more sensual and made her glance expressive of something more perverse
and unwholesome, to the deep purple of certain roses, a red that was
almost black; and each of these Albertines was different, as in every
fresh appearance of the dancer whose colours, form, character, are
transmuted according to the innumerably varied play of a projected
limelight. It was perhaps because they were so different, the persons
whom I used to contemplate in her at this period, that later on I
became myself a different person, corresponding to the particular
Albertine to whom my thoughts had turned; a jealous, an indifferent, a
voluptuous, a melancholy, a frenzied person, created anew not merely
by the accident of what memory had risen to the surface, but in
proportion also to the strength of the belief that was lent to the
support of one and the same memory by the varying manner in which I
appreciated it. For this is the point to which we must always return,
to these beliefs with which most of the time we are quite
unconsciously filled, but which for all that are of more importance to
our happiness than is the average person whom we see, for it is
through them that we see him, it is they that impart his momentary
greatness to the person seen. To be quite accurate I ought to give a
different name to each of the 'me's' who were to think about Albertine
in time to come; I ought still more to give a different name to each
of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same, like—called
by me simply and for the sake of convenience 'the sea'—those seas
that succeeded one another on the beach, in front of which, a nymph
likewise, she stood apart. But above all, in the same way as, in
telling a story (though to far greater purpose here), one mentions
what the weather was like on such and such a day, I ought always to
give its name to the belief that, on any given day on which I saw
Albertine, was reigning in my soul, creating its atmosphere, the
appearance of people like that of seas being dependent on those
clouds, themselves barely visible, which change the colour of
everything by their concentration, their mobility, their
dissemination, their flight—like that cloud which Elstir had rent one
evening by not introducing me to these girls, with whom he had stopped
to talk, whereupon their forms, as they moved away, had suddenly
increased in beauty—a cloud that had formed again a few days later
when I did get to know the girls, veiling their brightness,
interposing itself frequently between my eyes and them, opaque and
soft, like Virgil's Leucothea.

No doubt, all their faces had assumed quite new meanings for me since
the manner in which they were to be read had been to some extent
indicated to me by their talk, talk to which I could ascribe a value
all the greater in that, by questioning them, I could prompt it
whenever I chose, could vary it like an experimenter who seeks by
corroborative proofs to establish the truth of his theory. And it is,
after all, as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to
approach near enough to the things that have appeared to us from a
distance to be beautiful and mysterious, to be able to satisfy
ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty. It is one of the
systems of hygiene among which we are at liberty to choose our own, a
system which is perhaps not to be recommended too strongly, but it
gives us a certain tranquillity with which to spend what remains of
life, and also—since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us
that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out
of the common—with which to resign ourselves to death.

I had now substituted, in the brains of these girls, for their
supposed contempt for chastity, their memories of daily 'incidents,'
honest principles, liable, it might be, to relaxation, but principles
which had hitherto kept unscathed the children who had acquired them
in their own respectable homes. And yet, when one has been mistaken
from the start, even in trifling details, when an error of assumption
or recollection makes one seek for the author of a malicious slander,
or for the place where one has lost something, in the wrong direction,
it frequently happens that one discovers one's error only to
substitute for it not the truth but a fresh error. I drew, so far as
their manner of life and the proper way to behave with them went, all
the possible conclusions from the word 'Innocence' which I had read,
in talking familiarly with them, upon their faces. But perhaps I had
been reading carelessly, with the inaccuracy born of a too rapid
deciphering, and it was no more written there than was the name of
Jules Ferry on the programme of the performance at which I had heard
Berma for the first time, an omission which had not prevented me from
maintaining to M. de Norpois that Jules Ferry, beyond any possibility
of doubt, was a person who wrote curtain–raisers.

No matter which it might be of my friends of the little band, was not
inevitably the face that I had last seen the only face that I could
recall, since, of our memories with respect to a person, the mind
eliminates everything that does not agree with our immediate purpose
of our daily relations (especially if those relations are quickened
with an element of love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the
moment that is about to come)? That purpose allows the chain of spent
days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a
quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night,
and in the journey which we make through life, counts as real only in
the place in which we at any given moment are. But all those earliest
impressions, already so remote, could not find, against the blunting
process that assailed them day after day, any remedy in my memory;
during the long hours which I spent in talking, eating, playing with
these girls, I did not remember even that they were the same ruthless,
sensual virgins whom I had seen, as in a fresco, file past between me
and the sea.

Geographers, archaeologists may conduct us over Calypso's island, may
excavate the Palace of Minos. Only Calypso becomes then nothing more
than a woman, Minos than a king with no semblance of divinity. Even
the good and bad qualities which history teaches us to have been the
attributes of those quite real personages, often differ widely from
those which we had ascribed to the fabulous beings who bore the same
names as they. Thus had there faded and vanished all the lovely
mythology of Ocean which I had composed in those first days. But it is
not altogether immaterial that we do succeed, at any rate now and
then, in spending our time in familiar intercourse with what we have
thought to be unattainable and have longed to possess. In our later
dealings with people whom at first we found disagreeable there
persists always, even among the artificial pleasure which we have come
at length to enjoy in their society, the lingering taint of the
defects which they have succeeded in hiding. But, in relations such as
I was now having with Albertine and her friends, the genuine pleasure
which was there at the start leaves that fragrance which no amount of
skill can impart to hot–house fruits, to grapes that have not ripened
in the sun. The supernatural creatures which for a little time they
had been to me still introduced, even without any intention on my
part, a miraculous element into the most commonplace dealings that I
might have with them, or rather prevented such dealings from ever
becoming commonplace at all. My desire had sought so ardently to
learn the significance of the eyes which now knew and smiled to see
me, but whose glances on the first day had crossed mine like rays from
another universe; it had distributed so generously, so carefully, so
minutely, colour and fragrance over the carnation surfaces of these
girls who now, outstretched on the cliff–top, were simply offering me
sandwiches or guessing riddles, that often, in the afternoon, while I
lay there among them, like those painters who seek to match the
grandeurs of antiquity in modern life, give to a woman cutting her
toe–nail the nobility of the
Spinario
, or, like Rubens, make
goddesses out of women whom they know, to people some mythological
scene; at those lovely forms, dark and fair, so dissimilar in type,
scattered around me in the grass, I would gaze without emptying them,
perhaps, of all the mediocre contents with which my everyday
experience had filled them, and at the same time without expressly
recalling their heavenly origin, as if, like young Hercules or young
Telemachus, I had been set to play amid a band of nymphs.